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Weblogs trashed (cont.)

5 comments on Weblogs trashed (cont.)

Weblogs trashed (cont.)
: Gotta love Rick Bruner’s take on the poo-pooing of the Pew study that counts blogs:

Gotta love CNN’s spin: “Very few bloggers on Net.” The report in question, from Pew Research, concludes that two percent of U.S. Internet users kept online journals last year, but it goes on to say that more recent research from the last couple of months suggests that figure may have risen to seven percent. Based on Pew’s own estimates of how many Americans are now online (126 million adults, as of last December), that works out to 2.5 million to 8.8 million bloggers in this country.

To put that in perspective, while some 86 million U.S. homes have CNN on their cable dials, only some 3.6 million people were tuning in daily to see its live coverage of the Iraq invasion, and its top-viewed regular show, Larry King, attracts only one million viewers on average. Very few indeed.

It’s even better than that. Pew says that 11 percent read blogs. So that’s 14 million Americans. Beats the hell out of CNN.

My takes here and here.

5 responses to “Weblogs trashed (cont.)”

  1. Steven I. Weiss Avatar
    Steven I. Weiss

    I just don’t get it. Why the hell does it matter how many *bloggers* there are? What matters is how man *blog readers* there are. I keep waiting to see someone dismiss the study thusly, but it hasn’t happened. What proportion of the US population is actually reporting for CNN? That’s just not the relevant number.

  2. Seth Finkelstein Avatar
    Seth Finkelstein

    In bloggariah, the idea is that we’re *all* reporters. A few reporters and lots of readers is too much like that old dull media. Not the Shiny New Thing, which is openly distributed we-participatory democratic. That’s the reason.

  3. Terry Heaton Avatar
    Terry Heaton

    Jeff,
    Take a look further into the study for the real story. As I’ve blogged, Pew divided the overall 44 percent into three types of content creators: Power Creators, Older Creators and Content Omnivores. Examining the Power Creators is significant, because they are much younger than the other two types of creators, with an average age of 25 (compared to 58 in the Older group and 40 for the Omnivores). 40 percent of the Power Creators have broadband Internet access.
    “Power creators might also be called the Bloggers

  4. charles austin Avatar
    charles austin

    But the most important aspect of the number of bloggers is that I would bet they are substantially more likely to be voters than the general populace, and given the strong preponderance of anti-idiotarianism — regardless of political persuasion — their impact as swing voters is much, much greater than the numbers would indicate.

  5. Eric Pobirs Avatar
    Eric Pobirs

    This is completely silly. Out of all the people who read a daily newspaper, how many of them have ever written for one? Certainly not a high percentage, yet does that invalidate the daily newspaper?